Speaking Addictions: Substitution, Metaphor and Authenticity in Newspaper Representations of Methadone Treatment

Abstract

Press coverage of addiction tends to be prolific if not always accurate or considered. This article examines the ways in which methadone treatment is reported in three respected daily newspapers, the New York Times, the Times (London) and the Sydney Morning Herald. To conduct this analysis I focus on the role of metaphor, asking what impact the use of metaphor–-both to figure methadone and to mobilize it as a figure for other phenomena–-has in this context. In the process I consider the status of metaphor itself within Western liberal discourse, and trace the ways in which methadone treatment can be seen not only as a resource for, and object of, metaphorical description and production, but itself as a kind of metaphor–-a metaphor for heroin. In concluding, I argue that methadone is aligned in the print media with inauthenticity, disorder and the feminine, and I link this with methadone's implicit ontological status as always already metaphor.